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Nuh Ha Mim Keller

NUH HA MIM
KELLER

Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern United States, I was
raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The Church provided a spiritual
world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if anything more real than
the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and especially after I
entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to the religion
became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.

One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred
in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to laymen that
the Church had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke about
flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics they seemed
to be groping in the dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the human
soul, and there was no new revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes,
week after week, year after year; adding, subtracting, changing the language
from Latin to English, finally bringing in guitars and folk music. Priests
explained and explained as laymen shook their heads. The search for relevance
left large numbers convinced that there had not been much in the first place.

A second reason was a number of doctrinal difficulties, such as the doctrine
of the Trinity, which no one in the history of the world, neither priest
nor layman, had been able to explain in a convincing way, and which resolved
itself, to the common mind at least, in a sort of godhead-by-committee, shared
between God the Father, who ruled the world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ,
who saved humanity on earth; and the Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white
dove and appeared to have a considerably minor role. I remember wanting to
make special friends with just one of them so he could handle my business
with the others, and to this end, would sometimes pray earnestly to this
one and sometimes to that; but the other two were always stubbornly there.
I finally decided that God the Father must be in charge of the other two,
and this put the most formidable obstacle in the way of my Catholicism, the
divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it plain that the nature of
man contradicted the nature of God in every particular, the limitary and
finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite on the other. That Jesus
was God was something I cannot remember having ever really believed, in childhood
or later.

Another point of incredulity was the trading of the Church in stocks and
bonds in the hereafter it called indulgences. Do such and such and so-and-so
many years will be remitted from your sentence in purgatory that had seemed
so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the Reformation.

I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture, something on the order of
a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas,
a handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling
and devoid of a coherent thread that it was difficult to think of a way to
base ones life upon it. Only later did I learn how Christians solve the
difficulty in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian theologies, each
emphasizing the texts of their sect and downplaying the rest; Catholics by
downplaying it all, except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy. Something
seemed lacking in a sacred book that could not be read as an integral whole.

Moreover, when I went to the university, I found that the authenticity of
the book, especially the New Testament, had come into considerable doubt
as a result of modern hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In
a course on contemporary theology, I read the Norman Perrin translation of
The Problem of the Historical Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal
New Testament scholars of this century. A textual critic who was a master
of the original languages and had spent long years with the texts, he had
finally agreed with the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann that without a
doubt it is true to say that the dream of ever writing a biography of Jesus
is over, meaning that the life of Christ as he actually lived it could not
be reconstructed from the New Testament with any degree of confidence. If
this were accepted from a friend of Christianity and one of its foremost
textual experts, I reasoned, what was left for its enemies to say? And what
then remained of the Bible except to acknowledge that it was a record of
truths mixed with fictions, conjectures projected onto Christ by later followers,
themselves at odds with each other as to who the master had been and what
he had taught. And if theologians like Jeremias could reassure themselves
that somewhere under the layers of later accretions to the New Testament
there was something called the historical Jesus and his message, how could
the ordinary person hope to find it, or know it, should it be found?

I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things
of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know?
When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers,
and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands. I then embarked
on a search that is perhaps not unfamiliar to many young people in the West,
a quest for meaning in a meaningless world.

I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting
to believe, seeking not philosophy, but rather a philosophy.

I read the essays of the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught
about the phenomenon of the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical
strength, and intelligence all passed from one with the passage of years,
but only moral excellence remained. I took this lesson to heart and remembered
it in after years. His essays also drew attention to the fact that a person
was wont to repudiate in later years what he fervently espouses in the heat
of youth. With a prescient wish to find the Divine, I decided to imbue myself
with the most cogent arguments of atheism that I could find, that perhaps
I might find a way out of them later. So I read the Walter Kaufmann translations
of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius
dissected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind with brilliant philological
and psychological arguments that ended in accusing human language itself,
and the language of nineteenth-century science in particular, of being so
inherently determined and mediated by concepts inherited from the language
of morality that in their present form they could never hope to uncover reality.
Aside from their immunological value against total skepticism, Nietzsches
works explained why the West was post-Christian, and accurately predicted
the unprecedented savagery of the twentieth century, debunking the myth that
science could function as a moral replacement for the now dead religion.

At a personal level, his tirades against Christianity, particularly in The
Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the
monotheistic tradition into a small number of analyzable forms. He separated
unessential concepts (such as the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deitys
suicide on the cross) from essential ones, which I now, though without believing
in them, apprehended to be but three alone: that God existed; that He created
man in the world and defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that
He would judge man accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward
or punishment.

It was during this time that I read an early translation of the Koran which
I grudgingly admired, between agnostic reservations, for the purity with
which it presented these fundamental concepts. Even if false, I thought,
there could not be a more essential expression of religion. As a literary
work, the translation, perhaps it was Sales, was uninspired and openly hostile
to its subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged
for its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt
a desire to learn Arabic to read the original.

On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some
fields of wheat, and it happened that the sun went down. By some inspiration,
I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one
God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to provide the details
of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness
that atheism was an inauthentic way of being.

I carried something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University
of Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory how moral
judgments were reached reading and searching among the books of the philosophers
for something to shed light on the question of meaninglessness, which was
both a personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of
our age.

According to some, scientific observation could only yield description statements
of the form X is Y, for example, The object is red, Its weight is two kilos,
Its height is ten centimeters, and so on, in each of which the functional
was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments the functional
element was an ought, a description statement which no amount of scientific
observation could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was logically
meaningless, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that reminded
me of those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a moral
philosopher coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog.
For such a person, expediency ruled, and nothing checked his behavior but
convention.

As Chicago was a more expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money,
I found summer work on the West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska.
The sea proved a school in its own right, one I was to return to for a space
of eight seasons, for the money. I met many people on boats, and saw something
of the power and greatness of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the
smallness of man. These things lay before us like an immense book, but my
fellow fishermen and I could only discern the letters of it that were within
our context: to catch as many fish as possible within the specified time
to sell to the tenders. Few knew how to read the book as a whole. Sometimes,
in a blow, the waves rose like great hills, and the captain would hold the
wheel with white knuckles, our bow one minute plunging gigantically down
into a valley of green water, the next moment reaching the bottom of the
trough and soaring upwards towards the sky before topping the next crest
and starting down again.

Early in my career as a deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation
of Jean Paul Sartres "Being and Nothingness", in which he argued that phenomena
only arose for consciousness in the existential context of human projects,
a theme that recalled Marxs 1844 manuscripts, where nature was produced by
man, meaning, for example, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his
consciousness hypostatizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a
poet does, for example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation;
to the poet, a forest; to the capitalist, lumber. According to such a
perspective, a mountain only appears as tall in the context of the project
of climbing it, and so on, according to the instrumental relations involved
in various human interests. But the great natural events of the sea surrounding
us seemed to defy, with their stubborn, irreducible facticity, our
uncomprehending attempts to come to terms with them. Suddenly, we were just
there, shaken by the forces around us without making sense of them, wondering
if we would make it through. Some, it was true, would ask Gods help at such
moments, but when we returned safely to shore, we behaved like men who knew
little of Him, as if those moments had been a lapse into insanity, embarrassing
to think of at happier times. It was one of the lessons of the sea that in
fact, such events not only existed but perhaps even preponderated in our
life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him were large, and he did
not control them.

Sometimes a boat would sink and men would die. I remember a fisherman from
another boat who was working near us one opening, doing the same job as I
did, piling web. He smiled across the water as he pulled the net from the
hydraulic block overhead, stacking it neatly on the stern to ready it for
the next set. Some weeks later, his boat overturned while fishing in a storm,
and he got caught in the web and drowned. I saw him only once again, in a
dream, beckoning to me from the stern of his boat.

The tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the towering sheer
cliffs rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet, the cold
and rain and fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers these
made little impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, supposed
to be tough. On one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an
occasional crew member while running at sea at the end of the season, invariably
the sole non-family member who worked with them, his loss saving them the
wages they would have otherwise had to pay him.

The captain of another was a twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions
of dollars worth of crab each year in the Bering Sea. When I first heard
of him, we were in Kodiak, his boat at the city dock they had tied up to
after a lengthy run some days before. The captain was presently indisposed
in his bunk in the stateroom, where he had been vomiting up blood from having
eaten a glass uptown the previous night to prove how tough he was.

He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw him in the Bering Sea
at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked in his wheelhouse
up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from just about
anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels of lights
and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatterproof windows
that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he communicated
by loudspeaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their gear up
from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights attached
to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into day.
The captain had a reputation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew
out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside
to have a cup of coffee without permission. Few crewmen lasted longer than
a season with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly income of, say,
a lawyer or an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were
made in the Bering Sea in those years, before overfishing wiped out the crab.

At present, he was at anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him
and he came aboard to sit and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length,
at times gazing thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows,
at times looking at each other sharply when something animated them, as the
topic of what his competitors thought of him. "They wonder why I have a few
bucks", he said. "Well I slept in my own home one night last year."

He later had his crew throw off the lines and pick the anchor, his eyes
flickering warily over the water from the windows of the house as he pulled
away with a blast of smoke from the stack. His watchfulness, his walrus-like
physique, his endless voyages after game and markets, reminded me of other
predatory hunter-animals of the sea. Such people, good at making money but
heedless of any ultimate end or purpose, made an impression on me, and I
increasingly began to wonder if men didn't need principles to guide them
and tell them why they were there. Without such principles, nothing seemed
to distinguish us above our prey except being more thorough, and techno-
logically capable of preying longer, on a vaster scale, and with greater
devastation than the animals we hunted.

These considerations were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago,
where I became aware through studies of philosophical moral systems that
philosophy had not been successful in the past at significantly influencing
peoples morals and preventing injustice, and I came to realize that there
was little hope for it to do so in the future. I found that comparing human
cultural systems and societies in their historical succession and multiplicity
had led many intellectuals to moral relativism, since no moral value could
be discovered which on its own merits was transculturally valid, a reflection
leading to nihilism, the perspective that sees human civilizations as plants
that grow out of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils,
thriving for a time, and then dying away.

Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among them Emile Durkheim
in his "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", or Sigmund Freud in his
"Totem and Taboo", which discussed mankind as if it were a patient and diagnosed
its religious traditions as a form of a collective neurosis that we could
now hope to cure, by applying to them a thoroughi- going scientific atheism,
a sort of salvation through pure science.

On this subject, I bought the Jeremy Shapiro translation of "Knowledge and
Human Interests" by Jurgen Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing
as pure science that could be depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady
improvement of itself and the world. He called such a misunderstanding scientism,
not science. Science in the real world, he said, was not free of values,
still less of interests. The kinds of research that obtain funding, for example,
were a function of what their society deemed meaningful, expedient, profitable,
or important. Habermas had been of a generation of German academics who,
during the thirties and forties, knew what was happening in their country,
but insisted they were simply engaged in intellectual production, that they
were living in the realm of scholarship, and need not concern themselves
with whatever the state might choose to do with their research. The horrible
question mark that was attached to German intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities
became public after the war made Habermas think deeply about the ideology
of pure science. If anything was obvious, it was that the nineteenth-century
optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no longer tenable.

I began to re-assess the intellectual life around me. Like Schopenhauer,
I felt that higher education must produce higher human beings. But at the
university, I found lab people talking to each other about forging research
data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who wouldn't permit
tape recorders at their lectures for fear that competitors in the same field
would go one step further with their research and beat them to publication;
professors vying with each other in the length of their courses syllabuses.
The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary, unregenerate
humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics as they
had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after getting
a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front of
the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly
looking for more fish; what could one say about the Ph.D.s who behaved the
same way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had
not developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in
their sophistication.

I wondered if I hadn't gone down the road of philosophy as far as one could
go. While it had debunked my Christianity and provided some genuine insights,
it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover, I felt that this was
somehow connected I didn't know whether as cause or effect to the fact that
our intellectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously comprehend itself.
What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen, garbagemen, or kings,
except bit players in a drama we did not understand, diligently playing out
our roles until our replacements were sent, and we gave our last performance?
But could one legitimately hope for more than this? I read "Kojves Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel", in which he explained that for Hegel, philosophy
did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone able
to answer any possible question on the ethical implications of human actions.
This made me consider our own plight in the twentieth century, which could
no longer answer a single ethical question.

It was thus as if this centurys unparalleled mastery of concrete things had
somehow ended by making us things. I contrasted this with Hegels concept
of the concrete in his "Phenomenology of Mind". An example of the abstract,
in his terms, was the limitary physical reality of the book now held in your
hands, while the concrete was its interconnection with the larger realities
it presupposed, the modes of production that determined the kind of ink and
paper in it, the aesthetic standards that dictated its color and design,
the systems of marketing and distribution that had carried it to the reader,
the historical circumstances that had brought about the readers literacy
and taste; the cultural events that had mediated its style and usage; in
short, the bigger picture in which it was articulated and had its being.
For Hegel, the movement of philosophical investigation always led from the
abstract to the concrete, to the more real. He was therefore able to say
that philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose object was the ultimately
real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an irreducible lack in our
century. I began to wonder if, by materializing our culture and our past,
we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider humanity, from our
true nature in relation to a higher reality.

At this juncture, I read a number of works on Islam, among them the books
of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who believed that many of the problems of western
man, especially those of the environment, were from his having left the divine
wisdom of revealed religion, which taught him his true place as a creature
of God in the natural world and to understand and respect it. Without it,
he burned up and consumed nature with ever more effective technological styles
of commercial exploitation that ruined his world from without while leaving
him increasingly empty within, because he did not know why he existed or
to what end he should act.

I reflected that this might be true as far as it went, but it begged the
question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything on the face of
the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same plane, unless
one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher source, the sole
guarantee of the objectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise, one
mans opinion was as good as anothers, and we remained in an undifferen- tiated
sea of conflicting individual interests, in which no valid objection could
be raised to the strong eating the weak.

I read other books on Islam, and came across some passages translated by
W. Montgomery Watt from "That Which Delivers from Error" by the theologian
and mystic Ghazali, who, after a mid-life crises of questioning and doubt,
realized that beyond the light of prophetic revelation there is no other
light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received, the
very point to which my philosophical inquiries had led. Here was, in Hegels
terms, the Wise Man, in the person of a divinely inspired messenger who alone
had the authority to answer questions of good and evil.

I also read A.J. Arberrys translation "The Koran Interpreted", and I recalled
my early wish for a sacred book. Even in translation, the superiority of
the Muslim scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the
reality of divine revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed
before my eyes. In its exalted style, its power, its inexorable finality,
its uncanny way of anticipating the arguments of the atheistic heart in advance
and answering them; it was a clear exposition of God as God and man as man,
the revelation of the awe-inspiring Divine Unity being the identical revelation
of social and economic justice among men.

I began to learn Arabic at Chicago, and after studying the grammar for a
year with a fair degree of success, decided to take a leave of absence to
try to advance in the language in a year of private study in Cairo. Too,
a desire for new horizons drew me, and after a third season of fishing, I
went to the Middle East.

In Egypt, I found something I believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark
of pure monotheism upon its followers, which struck me as more profound than
anything I had previously encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good
and bad, but all influenced by the teachings of their Book to a greater extent
than I had ever seen elsewhere. It has been some fifteen years since then,
and I cannot remember them all, or even most of them, but perhaps the ones
I can recall will serve to illustrate the impressions made.

One was a man on the side of the Nile near the Miqyas Gardens, where I used
to walk. I came upon him praying on a piece of cardboard, facing across the
water. I started to pass in front of him, but suddenly checked myself and
walked around behind, not wanting to disturb him. As I watched a moment before
going my way, I beheld a man absorbed in his relation to God, oblivious to
my presence, much less my opinions about him or his religion. To my mind,
there was something magnificently detached about this, altogether strange
for someone coming from the West, where praying in public was virtually the
only thing that remained obscene.

Another was a young boy from secondary school who greeted me near Khan
al-Khalili, and because I spoke some Arabic and he spoke some English and
wanted to tell me about Islam, he walked with me several miles across town
to Giza, explaining as much as he could. When we parted, I think he said
a prayer that I might become Muslim.

Another was a Yemeni friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the
Koran at my request to help me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside
the chair where I used to sit and read in my hotel room, and it was my custom
to stack the books on the floor. When I set the Koran by the others there,
he silently stooped and picked it up, out of respect for it. This impressed
me because I knew he was not religious, but here was the effect of Islam
upon him.

Another was a woman I met while walking beside a bicycle on an unpaved road
on the opposite side of the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and somewhat shabbily
clothed, and she was an old woman dressed in black from head to toe who walked
up, and without a word or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so suddenly
that in my surprise I dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had hurried
away. Because she thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she gave
me some money without any expectation for it except what was between her
and her God. This act made me think a lot about Islam, because nothing seemed
to have motivated her but that.

Many other things passed through my mind during the months I stayed in Egypt
to learn Arabic. I found myself thinking that a man must have some sort of
religion, and I was more impressed by the effect of Islam on the lives of
Muslims, a certain nobility of purpose and largesse of soul, than I had ever
been by any other religions or even atheisms effect on its followers. The
Muslims seemed to have more than we did.

Christianity had its good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with
confusions, and I found myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for
their fullest and most perfect expression. The first question we had memorized
from our early catechism had been Why were you created? to which the correct
answer was To know, love, and serve God. When I reflected on those around
me, I realized that Islam seemed to furnish the most comprehensive and
understandable way to practice this on a daily basis.

As for the inglorious political fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not
feel these to be a reproach against Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior
position in a natural order of world ideologies, but rather saw them as a
low phase in a larger cycle of history. Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands
had been witnessed before in the thorough going destruction of Islamic
civilization in the thirteenth century by the Mongol horde, who razed cities
and built pyramids of human heads from the steppes of Central Asia to the
Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of destiny brought forth the
Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it a vibrant political
reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I reflected, merely the turn
of contemporary Muslims to strive for a new historic crystallization of Islam,
something one might well aspire to share in.

When a friend in Cairo one day asked me, Why dont you become a Muslim, I
found that Allah had created within me a desire to belong to this religion,
which so enriches its followers, from the simplest hearts to the most magisterial
intellects. It is not through an act of the mind or will that anyone becomes
a Muslim, but rather through the mercy of Allah, and this, in the final analysis,
was what brought me to Islam in Cairo in 1977.

Is it not time that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled
to the Remembrance of God and the Truth which He has sent down, and that
they should not be as those to whom the Book was given aforetime, and the
term seemed over long to them, so that their hearts have become hard, and
many of them are ungodly? Know that God revives the earth after it was dead.
We have indeed made clear for you the signs, that haply you will
understand.
(Koran 57:1617)

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